The Flannel Generation Turns 40, and Millennials Go for a Walk

Generation X, the first post-1960s generation, is reaching middle age. The cohort Sara Scribner describes in Salon as “those born roughly between 1965 and 1980” grew up amidst the social transformations the Baby Boomers brought about, and the sources she examines have noticed a certain backlash:

The writer Emily Matchar has written a book called “Homeward Bound” about homespun, sustainable culture—a cozier, less punkish offspring of the original do-it-yourself indie culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s—as a rejection of what Xers and Millennials see as the false promise of career and marketplace. After 9/11 and then the economic collapse, some Xers even took things to the extreme, digging into their sustainable urban farms as a way of girding for a post-apocalyptic world.

Other generations say that we lucked out because there was no major war that took legions overseas, no presidential assassinations, no civil rights battles rocking our home turf. Not true, says Gregory Thomas. “Our war was at home and it was divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.”

… Many Xers seem nostalgic for the serene ‘50s childhood that they never had and they have been pretty focused on creating a solid home life for their children, whether it’s from re-creating the idyllic family-oriented tableaux depicted in an Ikea catalog or jarring their own preserves. Making things “from scratch”—stepping away from the marketplace—is the new status symbol. Domestic success for the college-educated Xer is gauged by how many processed food packages you have in your pantry. Neil Howe describes a recent survey in which a sample group of Xers were asked to pick their model mother. Among many options, they chose June Cleaver.

Maybe because Generation X was also the name of a punk band, I thought of a decrepit Johnny Rotten when I first saw the link to Scribner’s article on Twitter. But John Lydon was born in 1956; he’s a Boomer. Punk was actually a product of the same “generation” (a 20- or 30-year stretch, after all) that gave us the hippies. The representative Xers Scribner cites are “Liz Phair and Winona Ryder… Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Eazy-E and Kurt Cobain.” Two smart, sexy, and ultimately underachieving alterna-chicks, three white guys who killed themselves before they learned to dress like adults, and a black man who died of AIDS. Johnny Rotten just got rich, fat, and starred in a butter commercial—he really is a Boomer.

What one finds among Xers and millennials alike is a second-order decay of American idealism: the Boomers tore up the world of June Cleaver, but what the Boomers built wasn’t a liveable replacement. So now status symbols that have been taken for granted in this country for about 60 years are losing their power to charm. Rick Newman at Yahoo, for example, reports that millennials are indifferent to the automobile:

One of the biggest mysteries of millennials is why they seem to have little interest in cars, which have been an irresistible source of freedom and mobility for young people since the interstate highway system opened the whole country to Chevys and Mercurys in the 1950s. Yet millennials seem to scoff at the open road. The percentage of 16-to-24-year-olds with a driver’s license has dropped sharply since 1997, and is now below 70% for the first time since 1963. “Millennials are demonstrating significantly different lifestyle and transportation preferences than older generations,” declared a recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Group. Overall, it concluded, “the driving boom is over.”

Newman’s story points to the tough economy—over 16 percent unemployment for 16-to-24-year-olds, many of whom have mountains of student debt—but it’s worth asking as well what a “source of freedom and mobility” is supposed to mean for young people. Freedom and mobility to drive to Wal-Mart? The ’80s thing was to hang out at the mall, maybe the indie record store, but that’s 30 years in the past. Get a car so you can get a job at McDonald’s so you can earn enough money to… get a car? There was a time when driving meant you could get away from parental supervision, but parental supervision is the least of the millennials’ worries.

It wasn’t just the Boomers’ ’60s ethos that dismantled the social order but the consumer junk culture as well, and much of that consumerism only made sense within status hierarchies that both an unsustainable economy and Boomer sensibilities (or later generations’ revulsion against them) have destroyed. If a fortysomething Generation X’s success is hard to measure, it’s because the old measures—traditional, commercial, and countercultural alike—have been hollowed of meaning. Human driftwood is just what you’d expect to come of this.

The Xers have suffered worse from this anomie than millennials only because they have some memory—if only second-hand memories from TV—of what life was like for the Boomers. They had jobs, intact homes, and what seemed like a purpose in changing the world. The Xers knew what they were missing. The millennials aren’t defined by that absence in the same way, and I think they have a sense that what they want they’re going to have to build anew, or rediscover.

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24 Responses to The Flannel Generation Turns 40, and Millennials Go for a Walk

While the economy certainly has a huge impact on the culture for the millennial generation, what is a much larger tectonic shift, however, is that of the internet. Freedom and mobility is no longer linked to geography but can be found online, borders are becoming more and more meaningless for individuals who now regularly have virtual friends that reach across the globe. Why drive to meet someone in the next state when you can link up to them within seconds online, slay dragons in a virtual world, trade music or do whatever young people like to do (yes, even intimate encounters).

Look, putting aside whether or not the baby boomers are responsible for the economic times (certainly they will become an enormous drag on the economy as they enter retirement age), the millennials are the first generation who have grown up in the internet age. They text, tweet, Facebook, blog, game, shop, Youtube, etc., spending most of their day connected in some form or other to the internet. And, look, you don’t need a car to do it. You need the latest mobile, tablet or laptop. Look no further for status symbols.

Surely, the internet age has a much larger impact on the development and culture of the millennial generation than the fact that their grandmothers burned bras and smoked pot at Woodstock.

One thing I like to note, following on your mention of the self-destructive Gen X musicians…

Millennial indie rock musicians aren’t simply out to do heroin, sulk around the mall, and break stuff. They actually have something to say about the world, and it fills their music. Gone are the celebrations of nihilism and getting wasted, those having been replaced by commentary that is often a strong rejection of the messes the Boomers created.

OK then, Billy Idol (b. 1955 – contemporary of Johnny “Rotten” Lydon) was the front man for Generation X (before embarking on a solo career). that aside; excellent post-mortem (pun intended) on the Gen-X icons. might add that the double-whammy for Gen X was the fact that the Baby Boomers “dismantling” of the June Cleaver culture as perhaps a more organic even. whatever “ethos” or cause fueled Gen X was itself (ultimately) fueled by corporate America. The Baby Boomers came of age in the era of civil rights, women’s liberation, Vietnam (draft), and Watergate. Gen-X came of age in the era of MTV.

“Get a car so you can get a job at McDonald’s so you can earn enough money to… get a car? There was a time when driving meant you could get away from parental supervision, but parental supervision is the least of the millennials’ worries.”

I am a Gen-Xer who sold his car in 1991 because, to paraphrase Utah Phillips, no one had to go fight the Gulf War on my account. Riding my bike home from meeting the couple that would buy my car, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free.

The first half of Mr. McCarthy’s insight quoted above is spot-on and is a great insight into how we see the world. We understand the rats need to run their race, but also understand that they are using generations’ worth of resources (both physical and financial) in the process.

The second part is absolutely brilliant and sums up the situation perfectly for too many.

I’m among the oldest of the Millennials. For that reason, I’m better established professionally than most are so far, so maybe I don’t speak for everyone. But I don’t think it’s as bad as all that. Yes, Millennials face a very harsh economic environment. It’s starting to turn around, but it’s slow, especially for people just entering the workforce. Five bad years will take a serious toll on our future earnings. However, neither I nor most millennials I know are fixated on the negative. We’re not so much rejecting the Boomers – as a cohort we’re actually rather fond of our parents and bosses – as we are embracing simpler, cheaper, old-fashioned. It’s partly out of sheer necessity – we aren’t flush with money and many of us never will be given the growth in low-wage employment. And sure there’s also overly-cute hipster aspect to it. But it’s also partly a rediscovery of old treasures. If some things have taken a turn for the worse over the past few decades, then maybe our grandparents and great-grandparents knew some things we don’t anymore. We like urban neighborhoods full of little houses which were once served by streetcar, trying our hands at organic gardening or bicycle maintenance or playing the harmonica, our time off with loved ones and friends, and so forth because these are good things in and of themselves. There’s an inherently conservative hook here, ripe for the taking. Develop a coherent message about the old virtues, community, responsibility, self-reliance by making things with your own hands, tradition, perseverence, volunteering, stewardship, even marriage. But our views on race and especially homosexuality are a departure from generations past. Failure to adjust fire accordingly will cause conservatism to miss the target entirely. And we just aren’t that engaged on the topic of fiscal policy – projections for 50 years in the future are sheer speculation given all the possible variables. I wouldn’t worry about it longer-term though (we do tend to be optimists in spite of it all.) Conservatism will grow back organically, though it won’t look quite like today’s talking heads on TV would expect.

There’s a reason that a number of folks use an earlier point than demographers used to use for denoting the end of the Boomer and the beginning of the Buster/Gen X generation: 1961 instead of 1965 (though one might make a good case those four years were a transition *between* the more firmly rooted two generational moods). This was even evident when I was in high school (class of ’79) and college (class of ’83), and teachers/professors remarked many times that my cohort had a noticeably different mood than its predecessors of many years running. I am just old enough to remember the wonderfulness of the mid-60s, the end of the second Civil War over civil rights and the Apollo missions, but also to have witnessed this all go to hell in a handbasket by the time I entered college (Iran hostages were taken in my first semester, and that – plus the revival of draft registration in anticipation of war with the USSR – marked a tremendous shift in mood for rising young adults).

“The representative Xers Scribner cites are “Liz Phair and Winona Ryder… Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Eazy-E and Kurt Cobain.” Two smart, sexy, and ultimately underachieving alterna-chicks, three white guys who killed themselves before they learned to dress like adults, and a black man who died of AIDS.”

I officially stopped watching MTV when Kurt Loder condescendingly told us Gen Xers that Kurt Cobain was the John Lennon of our age upon reporting that Cobain committed suicide.

That said, my favorite Winona Ryder movie is the cult classic movie Heathers, which was a prophetic and insightful take on what was to follow, i.e. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook.

The “Boomers’ 60s ethos” did not “dismantle the social order.” Boomers (born between 1948 and 1964) were children when the social order was already being rapidly dismantled by the Cold War and the post-World War II domestic economy.

Thinking that you could get nuked within 20 minutes of a launch somewhere in the USSR tends to give you a bit of a different perspective on life.

Much of the “swinging 60s” – especially in California – was put together not by Boomers but by Silent Generation and even some trailing-edge Greatest Generation innovators. For instance, the California counterculture started way before the 1960s, as a fusion of surfing culture and arts culture put together by people like Will Greer (Grandpa Walton on the Waltons) and Woody Guthrie, who founded alternative arts groups for artists blacklisted in the eary 1950s.

The CA hippie style didn’t spring out of the head of Zeus like Athena. Many early 1960s CA hippie clothes actually were scavenged from Grandma’s attic (flapper stuff, opera cloaks and jackets) or from the widespread Hawaiian and other ethnic designer clothes that were popular in the 1940s and 1950s. (Note I said “designer,” not mass-market knockoffs.)

Further, 1960s college students didn’t invent birth control, either. Their mothers were mass adopters of the pill when it went on the market in the late 1950s.

I know it’s fun to ascribe everything to Boomers, but most Baby Boomers inherited a tradition of resistance and counter-culture from a whole lot of Greatest and Silent Generation predecessors, including beatniks, social critics like Bruce, Sahl, Lehrer, etc, and dress reforms which started with the West Coast and Hawaiian boutique designers as well as the designers of Carnaby Street in England.

I always felt the Millennial generation to be very concerned about the future of this country but are very passive in anything that results in meaningful change. Millennial’s overwhelmingly elected President Obama but have been very silent on his failures. Luckily, I see Edward Snowden as representing a paradigm shift: the activist hacker.

In regards to the arts, you can only force feed a generation so many bad remakes of 80s movies before that bubble pops.

“Millennial’s overwhelmingly elected President Obama but have been very silent on his failures”
Then what were the Occupy protests for? To me, that was the entire millenial generation who voted for Obama, rejecting his empty calls for ‘hope and change,’ and forging their own….

Stef, thanks for trying to bring some reality to this ongoing Boomer-blame.

How many X’ers recall that the Boomers were caught in the first wave of massive divorce? The divorce rate slowdown that was a result of the Great Depression and WW2 picked up again by the mid-60s. The magazines at the time ran many a cover story about the marriage meltdown that picked up steam in the 70s. By the end of the 70s an entire generational layer of my family – the Silent Generation- was divorced.

I recall the onslaught of credit card ads and the massaging of ego that became the major marketing message of the day, in the late 60s/early 70s. Look where that got us.
The cultural meltdown was a product of post WW2 corporations taking advantage of the fact that the US had one of the only economies on the planet left standing.

I wish we could review the impact of business and government collusion on the cultural breakdown rather than taking the easy way out and blaming people for being born in an era. What can anyone do about the era into which they were born? I expect better of TAC, frankly.

There is one aspect of the economy that affects all job seekers, largely negatively.

Before, if you wanted to get a job in a certain area, such as New York or Chicago, you had to first move there, and then start looking in local newspapers, job fairs, etc.

Now, you can do a nationwide job search from your local Starbucks or library. You are competing not just with job seekers in your city, but from other parts of the country or globe as well.

For the employer, you can now select not just job candidates from around the country, but even job sites. If you are a large corporation like Caterpillar or the CME, you can constantly blackmail state and local governments by threatening to move to areas with lower taxes. Of course, such actions increase the burdens on companies that do not have political clout.

How long will people continue to regurgitate this “Generation” this or that crap? There are no “generations.” Folks are born and die continuously, and do not fall into neat patterns based on the year of their birth. A person born in 1964 (by some accounts a “boomer”) has a lot more in common with so called “x” ers born in 1965 than he does with folks born in 1946 (also called “boomers”). And the 1965 guy has more in common with him than folks born twenty years later…who are also called X ers.

Of course there are trends over time. Of course all generalities are artificial, and, if you push them hard enough, they fall apart. But “generations” seem particularly lame. The traits supposedly associated with them are so non specific, so open to differing, if not completely opposite interpretations, as to be completely meaningless.

There really was a “Baby Boom.” But that was a discreet, demographic event…a half decade or so of increased births in the mid Forties, representing the pent up desire to form families deferred first by Depression and then by world war. And that group of children, as they grew up, did have an impact. Because there were so damn many of them, they remade society, to some extent, into one of youth culture. This was felt most clearly in popular music, and other cultural fields, but then also, briefly, in politics too. Although, even there, as other posters have mentioned, Boomers were following in the footsteps of their elders a lot more than is commonly thought.

Still, and even with all those caveats, there was not “Baby Boomer” generation that started with kids born right after the war and continued until 1964 (or any other arbitrarily chosen stopping point). Woodstock was supposedly the Ur Boomer event, and kids born in 1946 were in their early twenties in the summer of 1969. But kids born in the early Sixties? What were they, at most, nine years old? They hardly participated in the alleged Boomer Generation festival, the Woodstock one in particular and the Sixties one in general.

And that is the Baby Boomers, the only generation that there is even any real population trend at all to hang your hat on. The only “generation” tied, however tenuously, to actual demographic events.

The “Greatest Generation?” Please, that was invented by Tom Brokaw to describe the so called World War II generation, way, way after the fact. But no single “generation” fought that war. High officers were born before the turn of the century. Many non coms were born in the early Teens. Junior officers and draftees were born in the late Twenties. Workers, who also helped win the war, were of all ages. The term was never used at the time, or at any time at all until a decade or so ago. Demographically, it means nothing.

Much the same for the other terms. Notice how the names don’t even pretend to relate to demographics. What does “Generation X” even purport to mean, other than, “Well, we have to say the boomers ended at some point, and we have no real event or even name to give to the next group, so let’s just call them ‘x?'” Other periodizations, such as “Echo boomer,” or “Silent Generation” never really caught on. And “Millenial” is a complete cop out, just a reference to the totally artificial, merely calendrical housekeeping notion of the Year 2k, which turned out to mean nothing at all.

The granddaddy of them all, the “Lost Generation,” meant zero in the USA, except to a few literatti. In France, the UK, and Germany, where millions of men were killed, mostly young ones, in World War I, it perhaps has a real meaning.

Focus on “generations” instead of real history, political science and even credible sociology only obscures the issues, such as the ones treated in the article. Boomers did not tear down traditional culture, rather, technology and prosperity created a popular culture industry, which Boomers, again, because of their sheer number, took over. Their parents were hardly listening to Beethoven and watching Shakespeare every night. Instead, they were listening to Frank Sinatra and watching Milton Berle. The Boomers substituted Elvis, and later the Beatles, Stones, etc for Frankie and Woody Allen for Uncle Milty.

As for cars, kids today are broke. So they can’t afford them. And, technology, again, plays a role. With all of the new communications devices and social networks, folks, especially those plugged in to the newest gizmos, like young people, can “travel” “virtually” without having to go anywhere in the real, physical world. They can “chat” and so forth with a group of friends without having to meet at the mall. As for the indie music store, they can download the same songs and then share and talk about them without leaving their homes.

“How long will people continue to regurgitate this “Generation” this or that crap? There are no “generations.” Folks are born and die continuously, and do not fall into neat patterns based on the year of their birth. A person born in 1964 (by some accounts a “boomer”) has a lot more in common with so called “x” ers born in 1965 than he does with folks born in 1946 (also called “boomers”). And the 1965 guy has more in common with him than folks born twenty years later…who are also called X ers.”

Generational statements usually, well, suck, but as a sweet spot Xer myself I perceive some correlation to a several things:
– cynicism
– lack of connection to outdoors (millenials more so)
– nihilism, rooted in suburban dystopia
– racial indifference
– better relationships, because our parents served as cautionary tales
– relatedly, extended adolescence
– more introspection about jingoism, though challenged by 9/11

9/11 is the seminal non-cultural event of our generation. Besides being a metaphor for the vulnerability of our institutions, the response of invading Iraq further cauterized our suspicions about the ability of our institutions to provide a framework for genuine, effective living.

Those who profit from keeping us divided against each other promote the “selfish boomers ruined everything” meme. I was born in 1944. The world was already screwed up when I got here. That’s the nature of “the world”. Turning people against their own grandparents seems downright evil to me.

Are you serious? I think any dystopia among younger people probably has more to do with our culture at large than with “suburban dystopia”. With the diminishment of religion and with other changes in our society, many people don’t seem to have a strong foundation for their beliefs, and this seems to contribute to a sense of nihilism.

I’m also with Philadelphia lawyer on this one. Generalizations about people based on what year they were born are foolish. The “generations” – greatest, silent, baby boom, x, millennial – are all artificial constructs. So this is the sort of piece I’d expect to read at Slate or Huffington Post rather than on an intelligent site devoted to independent onservative thought.

Exactly which “unsustainable economy” are you talking about, Mr. McCarthy? And who’s fault is it that the economy was unsustainable? The working class or the ruling class? The unions or the financial sector? Or is this an example of the “Invisibl Hand” at work?

The idea of “generations” was originally applied to groups in intellectual or literary history, broadly speaking — like those writers and artists who constituted the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. While there was always some approximation or simplification in speaking of “generations” in art or literature or thought, the idea had some descriptive and analytic value. How else could you talk about periodic changes in taste or artistic production?

Maybe when everybody wanted to get into the picture the inherent distortions of broad labels became more apparent. The larger part of any age cohort was likely not to be involved in changes in intellectual fashions. There was always more continuity than fit into neatly packaged generations or (still worse) “decades.” Still, it’s hard to see how intellectual or literary or even political history could do without the idea of generations.

FWIW, the birth control pill wasn’t approved and put on the market until 1960 and didn’t become widely used until later. Still, most of the early users wouldn’t have been boomers, and all those now obscure references to diaphragms in Fifties fiction indicate that birth control was well established before the baby boomers came of age.